Development of Extruder in Food Industry

Development of Extruder in Food Industry
The foundation of food extrusion lies in the snack and ready to eat breakfast cereal industries. History shows that the first application of the use of a cooking extruder in the food industry was in producing an expanded cornmeal based snack in the mid 1940s on a single screw extruder.

Mostly likely, this was either an expanded yellow cornmeal ball or curl that was then coated with some type of seasoning such as cheese and salt.

This is very similar to some of the products still offered by today by many snack producers.

Currently, there are more single than twin screw extruders in use in the food industry. The main reason for this is that they have been around longer than twin screw extruders.

Single-screw extruder were first used in the 1940s, which twin screw extruders were not developed for the food industry until the early 1980s.

However, twin-screw extruders are rapidly becoming the extruders of choice in the food industry.

Basically the fact is that twin-screw extruders have more versatility than single screw extruders.

They have a greater affinity to overcome year by year and crop to crop differences in raw materials, are better suited to extrude complex formula with “difficult” ingredients, have better conveying/pumping ability, and have better heat transfer.

In the mid 1970s, there were probably only four suppliers of food extruders, and at that time, those were only single-screw extruders.

Most of these extruders were used to produce snacks, ready to eat breakfast cereals, and textured vegetables proteins. By the late 1990s, there were at least ten suppliers of food extruders.
Development of Extruder in Food Industry